Thursday, March 08, 2007

Today I’d like to talk about Southernisms.A while ago I came across a YouTuber called Lemonette. She’s a cool woman and a lot of her videos are interesting to me because they’re about language.She’s from the South of the United States.And she has several videos teaching Southernisms – which are words or expressions that people use in the South of the United States.

These are some of the things that she teaches:Y’all is a contraction of you and all and she says hello Y’all means the same as hey you guys.The urban dictionary says that y’all is the Southern 2nd person plural pronoun.These are some examples:Where are y'all going?Please shut up, y'all!Hey, what are y'all doing tonight?"

Another expression Lemonette teaches is hot dang.Hot dang that movie was good wasn’t it?

According to the Urban Dictionary hot dang is an expression to express joy or excitement.

An expression for talking about food is:Boy that’s some count. Which means: This is delicious.

It ain’t no count means this doesn’t taste very good.

And finally ... if it’s raining heavily in the South – you can say:It’s raining like a cow pissing on a flat rock.

STICK NEWS

Kia ora, this is Stick News. Yesterday access to YouTube was blocked in Turkey. A Turkish court ordered the ban because it said the site was hosting videos which insulted the founder of modern Turkey.

The Republic of Turkey is a country which stretches from southwest Asia to southeastern Europe.The country is the successor state of what used to be the Ottoman Empire.The man responsible for the establishment of the Republic of Turkey is Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.Atatürk died in 1939 but his face and name can still be seen and heard everywhere in Turkey. His portrait is in public buildings, schools, school books, Turkish banknotes, and in the homes of many Turkish families.The Turkish Parliament has passed a law which means it is illegal to insult Atatürk’s legacy.But over the past week, Turkish media have said there’s a "virtual war" happening on YouTube between Greeks and Turks and videos insulting Atatürk have been uploaded to YouTube.After a Turkish courted ordered the ban yesterday, visitors to the site from Turkey were greeted with the message: "Access to this site has been blocked by a court decision".